From my vantage point, I get and see a lot of messages swirling around the ether and it seems to me there are a lot of people who are unhappy with their lives, bombarded with bad news, overwhelmed by too many messages and passwords, disconnected with their work, disconnected from the natural world and yearning for a simpler and more peaceful life. It is so easy to romanticize other things – animals, nature, people who live on farms.

I think I once thought of living on a farm as a kind of fairy tale, walks in the woods, misty mornings, animals grazing, a life among nature. I love living on a farm, I think the thing I most love about where I live is that I can see beautiful things every time I take a drive, every time I take a walk, every time I look outside the window. I never run out of beautiful things to photograph, they are all around me.

I have also learned that fairy tales do not generally exist outside of books. People who present their lives as fairy tales are not always in reality, not always telling the truth. Sometimes they are marketing themselves, sometimes they really believe it. I used to do it, it worked well for me, but only for awhile.

Life is a reality show, it makes itself felt. I think of all these biographies about beautiful movie stars that everybody things have the most perfect lives, yet the reality of their lives are not all that different from ours – life happens to them, too, all the time, and sometimes pretty severely. I see a lot of farm books that offer farms as a new kind of American fairy tale – they seem so different, so pure, so independent. That is the story a lot of people want and need.

I try to be authentic in my writing, I sometimes succeed, I am working at it. I have endearing donkeys here, great dogs, affectionate barn cats, easy going sheep, a beautiful pasture.  But I never see a farm as a perfect life, I never see myself as living a fairy tale. Real life has caught up with me here, life happens just as much here as it does any place else, I have learned that I can be happy anywhere if I do the work I need to do and face up to the truth about myself.

I thought the first Bedlam Farm was a fairy tale, I wrote about it in that way. But it was as much of a trap as it was a fairy tale, as much a cautionary tale as a magical one. What I have learned is that we can write our own story anywhere we are, we don’t have to flee our lives to do it, or covet someone else’s life.

I have learned this about fairy tales: They are cautionary tales. Be careful about them. I love my life, but I will never again dishonor it by turning it into a fable.

 

The problem with all my moving, I learned – I moved about 15 times in  my life – was that I always came along. The face I saw in the mirror was the same one I always wanted to run away from. He was a tenacious little sucker, he kept following me. Now, I am done with moving, I have made my stand, am standing in my truth, have found my place. I no longer think there is a fairy tale a waiting me in another place – the ocean, a writer’s colony, magical helpers